Come 24th October, some iPhone users will not be able to use WhatsApp on their devices. This as support documents for the messaging service confirm that an iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 or iOS 11, will no longer be supported by the Meta-owned platform.
The discovery was first reported by WABetaInfo, which spotted some notifications that were being sent out to users who were running the aforementioned version of iOS.
According to screenshots, the end of support will happen on 24th October, affecting all users who are not running iOS 12 or higher.
While an update to the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system can be done to avoid this, there are some model of iPhone which will not be able to access WhatsApp at all after 24th October.
To that end the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C will be excluded. Given that both devices were released in September of 2013 and are close to a decade old, the amount of consumers who will be impacted will likely prove slim.
That said, those older models of iPhone are still quite popular, not to mention not every customer being able to upgrade to the latest piece of Apple hardware. In any case, it will be interesting to see how many people are affected by this change later in the year.
For those running other operating systems on their smartphones, WhatsApp says the following versions are supported:
- “Android running OS 4.1 and newer
- iPhone running iOS 12 and newer
- KaiOS 2.5.0 and newer, including JioPhone and JioPhone 2.”
